Updated at 9:30am yesterday.
The Goldman Trial by Cédric Kahn (Boredom, a Better Life) is an exciting, closed session centered around a feverish and eloquent protagonist who engages in a fascinating verbal tournament, like a boxer alone in the ring against the French justice system finds again.
Pierre Goldman, an intellectual and far-left activist who fought alongside revolutionaries in the Venezuelan Maquis, was sentenced to life in prison in 1974 for four armed robberies in Paris, one of which resulted in the deaths of two people. Due to doubts about the evidence presented in the first instance, he received a second trial in 1976.
Goldman maintained his innocence in the murder in a book written in prison and celebrated by the French left-wing intelligentsia (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Régis Debray, etc.), which made him a literary star.
The half-brother of singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, son of Jewish resistance fighters of Polish origin, admits to being the perpetrator of three robberies, but not the one on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in which two pharmacists were killed.
Goldman provocatively used the second jury trial to denounce the French judiciary and police, whom he accused of anti-Semitism and systemic racism. He is particularly committed to the rights of black people (his partner is of West Indian origin). Is his violent attack on the establishment part of a strategy to better portray himself as a victim and perhaps exonerate himself from violent crime?
Cédric Kahn makes the wise decision not to decide the question for the viewer, but to put him in the position of the juror. His process film, which is classic in form, finds its originality precisely in the extreme sobriety of its production. Almost the entire story takes place in court. There are no flashbacks and hardly a few scenes in which Pierre Goldman finds himself anywhere other than in the dock.
The film will be shown at the opening of Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and the Cinémania Festival and begins in the office of Georges Kiejman, a future star lawyer whose future as an outstanding litigator is foreseeable. In the role of this defense attorney, whom Pierre Goldman immediately rejects, the filmmaker of “Black Diamond” and co-author of “Anatomy of a Fall” (by his partner Justine Triet), Arthur Harari, is very apt. But it is Arieh Wolthalter who attracts almost all the attention as Goldman, a paradoxical and elusive creature, thanks to a statement of extraordinary intensity and sudden anger against all forms of authority.
Theatrical in form, with lyrical flights of fancy that sometimes seem exaggerated, “The Goldman Trial” does not claim to be a faithful reconstruction, but rather a reinterpretation of this legendary affair by Cédric Kahn, who did not have access to the transcripts of the witness statements He let his imagination run wild by drawing inspiration from newspaper articles of the time for his screenplay (co-written with Nathalie Hertzberg).
The exercise does not lack interest, on the contrary, even if we can ask ourselves what is true in this process in which everything seems aggravated and exaggerated, in essence the French criminal justice system offers a particularly fertile canvas for twists and effects of the Toga. Whatever the case, Cédric Kahn paints a compelling portrait of this period that still has some resonance today, when French society is still plagued by anti-Semitism and systemic racism.
His film, as the name suggests, focuses only on the trial of Pierre Goldman. The man, who was notably the owner of a salsa club and a journalist for Nouvel Obs, was murdered three years later by right-wing extremist activists. He was 35 years old.
Historical drama
The Goldman Trial
Cedric Kahn
With Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié
1:55am
Inside